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Wild Cherry is an intimate, devastatingly glamorous restaurant set inside the lobby of the Cherry Lane Theatre, a famously scrappy West Village playhouse that was purchased, in 2023, by the indie-film production company A24. The new owners oversaw a top-to-toe upgrade of the century-old venue, sprucing up the seats and revamping the lobbies and bathrooms down to the tiniest detail. Wild Cherry, which is operated by the chef-restaurateurs Lee Hanson and Riad Nasr, of Frenchette and Le Veau d’Or, has taken up residence in a windowless space that was once a black-box theatre-within-the-theatre for showing experimental works.

The theme isn’t subtle: the restaurant is a clubby little boîte, gussied to the nines in haute-theatrical fashion, with fern-frond wallpaper, checkerboard floors, and marquee lights dotting a proscenium-shaped archway. The old-school pizzazz extends to the bottle-green leather of the banquettes; the way the barrel-vaulted ceiling grasps and releases the light fixtures’ glow; the fuzzy glimmer of a zinc-topped, U-shaped bar that takes up much of the room; the enormous, bathtub-like booths against opposite walls that call out to host a splashy, celebrity-adjacent dinner party. But something gleefully strange is detectable beneath all that greasepaint, something off-kilter that stays true to the purity and absurdity of live theatre and its lovers. This is evident in the pastiche quality of the menu, which features a bit of Italian American social club, a dash of Midwestern veterans’ lodge, an edge of Old New York ritziness, and—these are the Frenchette folks, after all—an indelible streak of French bistro.

This could have easily been chaos, but it reads as mere idiosyncrasy, thanks to the sheer force of Wild Cherry’s appeal as a place to while away a few stylish hours. The music is hopping (when was the last time you heard “Ca’-Ba’-Dab,” by the Soul Swingers, and why isn’t every restaurant playing it on a loop?), and the mood is as warm as the lighting, with affable servers and bar staff whose enthusiasm is infectious. The cocktails skew tiki—a quart-size scorpion bowl with your dinner?—but they’re great, well-balanced and cleverly composed, like a zero-proof piña colada that gets heft and depth from hojicha, or a sherry highball tarted up with amaro and a splash of cola.

The sense of both seriousness and play extends to the food. Among a selection of chilled seafood is a showpiece-y whole Dungeness crab served “à la russe,” with stripes of finely minced chives, capers, and sieved egg; and a gorgeous scungilli salad, the tender slices of conch laced with celery leaves in a punchy vinaigrette, and served piled into the creature’s giant, whorling shell. The approach, over all, is eclectic but committed: a brawny kielbasa, redolent of garlic and studded with melty Comté, sits atop a languid bed of sauerkraut; hunks of chermoula-painted monkfish are laced on skewers and served with a tapenade of olives and raisins. Frogs’ legs—which Hanson and Nasr catapulted back into fashion with a persillade version at Le Veau d’Or—are battered and fried like little chicken drumettes, then glossed in butter and spangled with herbs. The menu’s only pasta is fettuccine Alfredo, a dish so earnestly out of style that it becomes viciously cool again; the sauce, made the traditional way, from just butter, Parmigiano, and an emulsifying splash of pasta water, is tossed together tableside by a server, sending fine particles of cheese flying everywhere like a joyous puff of confetti. For a hundred and twenty dollars, you can get a steak dinner for two, which includes a substantial Denver-cut filet, a lovely green salad, and an audaciously retrograde baked potato, which is also available à la carte, and which I plan to order regularly, alone at the bar, with a dirty Martini, and maybe a slab of pineapple-and-coconut cake for dessert.

Not all the oddness works. A lobster club sandwich was messy and too bread-forward, the sweetness of the meat overpowered by forcefully smoky rashers of bacon. A pair of chicken thighs served atop crispy frites—“thighs and fries,” the menu winks—is unremarkable, the meat underseasoned and encased in flabby skin. The fries, at least, are terrific, crisp and precise; they’re at their best eaten alongside the cheeseburger, which is maybe the star of the whole show, a standout even in a city overcrowded with fancy cheeseburgers. (This is no surprise, perhaps, given Hanson and Nasr’s role in creating the fabled Black Label burger for Minetta Tavern, way back when.) Its austere appearance—tidy, compact, no fripperies—belies a lascivious richness within: the beef is ground with marrow, the patty cooked to a yielding medium rare, the bun slicked with sauce choron, a béarnaise pinked up and slightly sweetened with a bit of tomato paste. Topped with a slice of cheddar and a few rounds of raw onion, it is served cut in half, which I’m sure will scandalize some purists, but it’s a thoughtful stroke of night-life engineering: a halved burger can be eaten with just one hand, so there’s no need to put down your drink.

Fettuccine Alfredo is tossed tableside.

Apart from little boxes of popcorn presented as a bar snack, there doesn’t seem to be any obvious symbiosis between Wild Cherry and the theatre it inhabits, and, if you happen to arrive when a show is beginning or letting out, the shared lobby can feel like a bit of a free-for-all. But once you’re inside, past the red-velvet curtain, at the host's vestibule, it really is transportive, in part because the restaurant’s mood of affectionate self-regard feels tinged with an anticipatory haze of nostalgia. With all its meticulous art direction and scene-setting, its A24-inflected sense of constructed narrative, it seems designed to age into a faded, charismatic reminiscence of itself. Thirty or forty years from now, when there’s dust in the corners and mending marks on the banquettes and an aging-diva sheen of once-was hanging over it all, the place will be most fully itself. Right now, we’re dining in the memory of an old haunt that’s still brand-new. ♦

In late 1969, Jane Kramer was back in Manhattan after a spell in Morocco with her husband, an anthropologist. In her absence, the sparks of second-wave feminism had ignited, in two forms: there were the liberals of NOW and also the radicals, whose colorful speak-outs were catnip to journalists. That fall, the Village Voice assigned the writer Vivian Gornick to skewer the “libbers,” but instead she wrote a rousing manifesto that ended with the mention of a new group—and a number to call if you wanted to join.

Kramer followed up, notebook in hand. The New Yorker, then led by William Shawn, was averse to polemical swashbuckling; it would never print a phone number as a kicker. But its writers could take their time. Kramer embedded with the Stanton-Anthony Brigade, the “founding cadre” of a set of revolutionary cells devoted to consciousness-raising, or C.R. She sat in as members shared intimate stories, seeking patterns of oppression and strategizing methods of resistance; she watched sisterhood blossom, then break down. By the time her piece came out, a year after Gornick’s, the brigade had dissolved, but the movement was thriving.

Kramer’s article, “Founding Cadre,” was an outlier for the period. It wasn’t a convert’s plea, like Gornick’s; or an insider’s dishy dispatch, like Susan Brownmiller’s movement roundup in the Times; or a bitingly confessional essay, like Sally Kempton’s “Cutting Loose,” in Esquire. But it wasn’t dismissive, either, like “The David Susskind Show.” Instead, it was icily observational, documenting the group’s rich, clashing perspectives in granular detail. There were pages of dialogue, as in a play, and long block quotes resembling monologues. The one thing the piece didn’t include was the women’s identities; the magazine concealed them with pseudonyms and radically altered identifying details. Even so, I could sort out who was who: “Hannah” was Shulamith Firestone, midway through writing “The Dialectic of Sex,” and “Barbara” was Anne Koedt, the author of “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm”; the others were Celestine Ware (“Margaret”), Martha Gershun (“Beatrice”), Diane Crothers (“Nina”), Minda Bikman (“Eve”), and Ann Snitow (“Jessica”).

Kramer’s piece is barely mentioned in histories of the era, and when I stumbled on it I was astonished: it was baggy, almost exhausting, at thirty thousand words, but full of wild spikes of insight and emotion. Like the recent play “Liberation,” it replicated the feeling of being inside a C.R. group, a sensation both grand and claustrophobic. In a typical scene, the cadre met in an East Village walkup and slid from idea to idea, lambasting romance novels, sharing awful tales of marital violence, then musing over who was “male-identifying”—aggressive, careerist. Freud and Marx came up; so did class and race. (Ware was the brigade’s sole Black member, but her race wasn’t mentioned, and, after hosting the first meeting, she quit to write a book.) Tenderness and cruelty overlapped. You can tell whom Kramer liked best.

In 1996, Kramer published a follow-up essay, “The Invisible Woman,” for a special issue on feminism commissioned by Tina Brown, the magazine’s editor at the time. The piece began with a mea culpa. In 1970, Kramer wrote, she had been deeply unsettled by her time in Morocco, where she’d seen a thirteen-year-old girl forcibly married off. She patronized the cadre’s radicals, pitying their singlehood and instability; newly pregnant, she was defensive, afraid that they viewed her as “a dreary housewife in flashy feminist clothes.” The pseudonyms hadn’t been her subjects’ idea, or her own: under Shawn, radical feminism had been viewed as akin to “an odd smell or a kinky preference—something too intimate, too embarrassing, to identify and expose.”

Even so, Kramer defended her methods: she’d let the women speak for themselves, in voices that proved powerful and prescient. Like Gornick, she was a convert. Five decades have only intensified the odd power of “Founding Cadre,” which captures, in its cool frame, the warm sound of women struggling, collectively, to create a revolution. “The Invisible Woman” now feels sadder, given its rosy ending—a celebration of Kramer’s daughter’s generation, which felt secure in the “sweet illusion” of the movement’s triumph. Kramer wrote, “It is hard, as a mother, not to want to see them keep that illusion for just a little longer.” ♦

Founding Cadre

In 1978, Václav Havel, the Czech playwright, dissident, and future President, wrote an essay, distributed clandestinely, that tells of a greengrocer who hangs a sign in his shopwindow reading “Workers of the World, Unite!” He doesn’t actually believe in this hollow slogan, nor do his customers—rather, they are all engaged in a performative ritual, a paean to a Communist system, which, through their act, they help perpetuate.

On January 20th, the Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, recalled Havel’s essay at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, during a speech that, for one delivered by a head of state, offered a rare degree of intellectual, even emotional, candor. Carney applied the condition of Havel’s greengrocer to the rules-based international order that came into being after the Second World War, much of it backstopped by the United States and wielded to its benefit. Even as powerful countries regularly acted as they pleased and international laws and regulations were applied with “varying rigor,” a nominal allegiance to a world of norms and to win-win coöperation endured.

“American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods: open sea-lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes,” Carney said. And it undergirded NATO, an alliance that had allowed for an unprecedented near-century of peace. That order, however imperfect, had more benefit than downside. So, Carney said of Canada and its European allies, “we placed the sign in the window.”

But the first year of Donald Trump’s second term has made the downside impossible to ignore. Last April, on “Liberation Day,” Trump announced a twenty-per-cent tariff on E.U. members. (“They rip us off,” he said.) His attempts to end the war in Ukraine featured an unmistakable sympathy for Vladimir Putin, while indicating that the war is really Europe’s problem, anyway, and that it shouldn’t count on the U.S. for significant military or financial support. Just after New Year’s, when Trump sent U.S. troops to Venezuela to seize President Nicolás Maduro, he suggested that more such actions would follow, telling the Times, “I don’t need international law.”

Yet nothing has thrown the diverging paths of the U.S. and Europe into plain view more than the crisis over Greenland, an autonomous Arctic territory that is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. For the past year, Trump has said that he intended to take possession of the island, with its militarily strategic location and its abundant, if difficult-to-access, rare earths. Only the U.S. can defend Greenland from the likes of Russia and China, he argued, telling Congress, “We’re going to get it one way or the other.” That is, the signal member of NATO, a collective-security body based on the principles of mutual self-defense, was threatening to seize the territory of another member.

For a time, Denmark and other NATO members seemed to think that they could placate Trump with promises to devote more resources to the Arctic. (An agreement from 1951 allowed the U.S. to maintain military installations in Greenland during the Cold War—it now operates only one—with an option to add other facilities.) For the past year, in fact, Europe has shown a willingness to engage in flattery and transactional dealmaking—a proven formula with Trump. At a NATO summit in June, in The Hague, it largely worked; the main goal was to keep the U.S. in NATO, preserving its role and its capabilities. States pledged to spend five per cent of G.D.P. on defense, and Trump deemed the summit “tremendous.” But, on Greenland, he appeared to be operating in another realm. “You defend ownership,” Trump said in early January. “You don’t defend leases.”

Later in the month, Denmark and several other European countries sent troops to Greenland for military exercises—ostensibly to prove that they are serious about safeguarding it from adversaries like Russia and China, though clearly also to send a message to Trump. “The fact that Europe felt it had to deploy a trip-wire force against the one power that, for generations, was seen as providing the ultimate trip-wire force for Europe’s defense is a complete reversal of our entire understanding of the world,” Fabrice Pothier, a former director of policy planning at NATO, said. Trump responded by announcing additional tariffs—rising to twenty-five per cent—which would remain in force until a U.S. acquisition of Greenland was finalized.

Nonetheless, at Davos, speaking a day after Carney, Trump appeared to walk back his more dramatic threats, saying that the U.S. would not use force to take Greenland and tabling the tariffs. Perhaps the European troop exercises made an impression on him, or maybe an adviser explained the potential effect of the so-called E.U. trade bazooka—a set of wide-ranging countermeasures that European leaders, including Emmanuel Macron, were advocating—which could inflict a hundred billion dollars of losses on the U.S. economy.

That same day, Trump announced the “framework” of a deal brokered by the NATO secretary-general, Mark Rutte. Details were scarce, but it appears that the U.S. and Denmark will revisit the 1951 agreement, and may add more U.S. bases or missile-defense stations as part of what Trump calls his Golden Dome. An additional clause could keep adversarial powers from investing in or profiting from Greenland’s resources. In other words, Trump caused a crisis in NATO to end up with basically the same set of options that existed months ago.

If that deal sticks, Europe may be tempted to see Trump’s walk back as the ultimate geopolitical TACO move—the land grab that wasn’t. The larger problem, though, isn’t so much Trump’s proposed actions as the logic guiding them. As Ivo Daalder, the U.S. Ambassador to NATO from 2009 to 2013, said, “Trump has made clear he’s willing to defend territory he owns, and less than willing if he doesn’t.” That “sends a rather existential message to the rest of NATO about the notion that the security of one is indivisible from the security of all.”

No matter the ultimate resolution, the crisis will accelerate Europe’s efforts to decouple its security from the U.S. That is neither an easy nor a quick proposition: for example, Europe has no equivalent to the U.S.-made Patriot air-defense platform that it can produce at scale. Moreover, Europe itself is divided: it couldn’t agree on a response to Trump’s tariff threats, nor is there consensus on which nation should take the lead, if not the U.S.

Still, the dissolution of a decades-old order may be inevitable. “We are taking the sign out of the window,” Carney said, echoing Havel again, at Davos. The U.S. may be powerful and mighty, but its longtime allies “have something, too—the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality.” ♦

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Tessa Hadley reads her story “The Quiet House,” from the February 2, 2026, issue of the magazine. Hadley has published thirteen books of fiction, including the story collections “Bad Dreams” and “After the Funeral,” and the novella “The Party.” She won a Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction in 2016.

Geraldine woke out of busy dreams into the calms and shallows of old age. There were two skylights in her attic bedroom, and when she opened her eyes she saw clouds floating past, slow and stately against a pale sky; the angular under-shape of a gull’s flight was printed for a moment, soundless beyond the glass. She was alone in the absolutely quiet house: she was used to this and it mostly felt like freedom, after the long years of her marriage. In her dreams, however, she had been plunged back into the thick of things—noisy crowds of people, children, movement, a train journey, talk, pleasure, sociable effort. She’d dreamed that Mattie Szymanski came to visit her on a bicycle and was still young, with his curly brown hair and a thick beard, which wasn’t attractive now but used to be. She’d known in her dream that in reality Mattie was long dead—he’d died in his forties, by which time he’d lost most of his hair—but she wasn’t sure whether he knew it, and this made their encounter especially numinous and poignant. He had called in at some house that must have been her house, and wanted to show her a novel he’d written, a typed carbon copy on thin paper. She was trying to put this novel back into its manila folder but the pages kept slipping and getting out of order, she couldn’t keep them together. As far as she knew, in real life Mattie had never written a novel or anything much, apart from his unfinished thesis on Hardy’s tragic heroes.

There was a time when, if Mattie Szymanski came into a room, everyone looked at him. The men wanted to be his rivals or his disciples and the women were in love with him—at least Geraldine was, and so was her best friend, Jane. They were undergraduates then, in the early seventies, and Mattie was a graduate student; they were in awe of him because he had read everything, knew everything. It seemed to Geraldine and Jane in those days that women were fatally flawed. Men were capable of being absorbed in thought and ideas purely, for their own sake, whereas women were always inauthentic, always conscious of themselves thinking. They couldn’t help viewing their ideas as an adjunct to their looks or their personality. While the men were holding forth to one another on Thomas Mann or Molière or Schopenhauer, the women were drowning in their awareness of the particulars of the scene in all its detail: the lighting and the mood, their own bodies and their clothes, the strands of power and connection flowing around the room. They were absorbed in the mystique of the men’s physical selves, of which the men themselves seemed unaware: a tightened crease beside a mouth, a shadow in a cheek’s hollow, eyes dropped to the papers and lump of resin and rolling tobacco on an LP cover, thick, sensitive, nicotine-stained fingers. Men had this easy, unconscious grandeur, because they didn’t know themselves. The girls longed to divert some of that rapt serious attention their way, to channel it and feel its force.

Mattie was tall and burly with a craggy face and an appealing awkward diffidence, bashful long lashes, a sweet quick grin, a slightly ponderous sense of humor; he was opinionated and original and eager, an enthusiast. Also he was Polish, or his parents were; they had got out in ’51, when Mattie was just a baby, so he had no memory of the place. Nonetheless, some romance of Poland stuck to him and made him seem cut out on a larger scale than the rest of them. His father had been in the Communist Party before the war and then turned against it because, in addition to all the obvious things, it was narrow and tedious. So Mattie was skeptical about Marxism at a time when it still had a lot of glamour for some of his fellow-students, even if they weren’t mad about the Soviet system. He was wary of their keenness for some kind of revolutionary sweeping away of the decadence and corruptions of the West. His world view seemed larger than theirs, less parochial; this was one of the reasons that he never quite fitted in at the university. He laughed at the place and was impatient with its stuffiness, yet made himself happily at home there. He was good at being happy, and his hearty appetites made the other students’ rebelliousness seem jejune and callow. There were so many things to learn from him.

Geraldine phoned Jane, to tell her about the dream. They lived, in their seventies, only a few streets away from each other in Bristol—where Geraldine had spent most of her adult life—and they often talked and visited. When Jane retired and she and her husband sold their London house, in order to give money to their children, Bristol had seemed as sensible a place to move to as anywhere.

“Was his novel any good?” Jane asked.

“I’ve no idea. You can’t read things in dreams. And surely can’t make critical judgments. I mean, when you’re effectively unconscious . . .”

“I’m always reading things in dreams and thinking they’re rubbish.”

“I was too busy fumbling with the pages anyway, trying to put it back in its folder. And I wasn’t really interested in the novel. The whole encounter was too amazing. I was so overwhelmed at being with Mattie again, after all these years. I’d forgotten him really, and then suddenly he was back, as if he’d never gone. He radiated this heat of life—it was intoxicating.”

“This is Mattie Szymanski we’re talking about? Mattie who fucked up and never did anything?”

“But it wasn’t the man he became later. It was the one we loved then, in the old days, don’t you remember?”

They hadn’t spoken about Mattie or even thought about him much for a long time, probably not for years; now Jane seemed to be distancing herself from their shared memories of him. Recently, she’d taken to shamelessly denying things from the past which they both knew were true. It wasn’t senility: Geraldine knew that Jane was perfectly aware of what had actually happened—or at least as aware as anyone could be, when it came to penetrating the opaque past. It was more like a game that Jane played to entertain herself, Geraldine thought, because she was bored now that she was retired. No doubt Jane felt that shedding some of the things you’d been and done and believed was one of the conveniences of growing older. She’d gaze at Geraldine frankly, to challenge her, her blue eyes still large and forthright: it was funny, Jane’s deadpan stare. Nothing happened at that party with the Persians in the hills above Florence. I don’t even remember a party.

Jane Rawlings, née Piggott, was handsome and big-boned, with a broad, benign, wholesome face and a thick swatch of gray-white hair pinned up behind; she looked patrician, which had been useful at university, although her mother was a school dinner lady and her dad an electrician in a colliery. Her tall hauteur was piquant in combination with her soft Derbyshire accent. Jane and Geraldine had knocked around Europe together for a while after they finished their degrees, sleeping on beaches or in convent hostels, soaking up other shapes of life, looking at art, learning that how they’d been brought up was not the only way, drinking real coffee for the first time, feeling that anything was possible. In those days, Jane was skinny and leggy and teasing and fearless, with the same quizzical open gaze as now, her straw-blond hair cut short. Geraldine, whose parents were both schoolteachers, was smaller and plumper and less obviously English, more sardonic. In photos from that time—there were only two or three, saved from the past by accident—they’re Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and Sancho’s eyes are black as pits, painted thickly with mascara and kohl. They’d lived for a few months near Nice, in a caravan with two men who sold drugs and forged the signatures on stolen travellers’ checks. Then they came back to England and both eventually got married. Jane joined the Civil Service, ended up in a senior position in the Cabinet Office. Geraldine’s career had been more haphazard; she’d knocked around doing all kinds of jobs and ended up teaching adult literacy.

During the time of their youthful adventures, and although they proclaimed themselves feminists, they still more or less thought all those things about the inauthenticity of women. They didn’t so much think them with their conscious minds: the sensation of secondariness was built into the very texture of their imagination and their desires. They supplied to every adventure some invisible observer, male, to fulfill it and make it real. And yet the girls also took for granted, with contemptuous confidence, their right to travel alone and wear shorts and sleeveless tops if they wanted to, while girls their age in Italy and Greece were kept chastely at home. They learned how to say foul things in other languages, in order to put off the boys and men in those countries who followed them and propositioned them, pleading with them so insistently and cravenly—“like dogs,” Jane said. They saw the recoil and disgust on the boys’ faces, at hearing those words from a girl’s mouth.

They had both been in love with Mattie when they left England, though they might easily have fallen for someone else among the other travellers they met, if Mattie hadn’t come to join them at the end of the summer. Arrangements in those days, before mobile phones, were more precarious and therefore more significant. They’d called him at his parents’ house, and it had seemed so improbable, as they dialled from a noisy public pay phone in one of those Italian post offices built with creamy marble to look like palaces, that they could ever be connected, across such long and winding distances, to somewhere in Clapham. But they were, first to Mattie’s mother’s thick, intolerant accent and then to genial Mattie himself, who made it sound as if agreeing to meet them on a certain day at a certain campsite outside Naples were the easiest thing in the world. Neither of them had slept with him at that point; they had just been hangers-on in Mattie’s crowd, insignificant among the more glamorous girls. And although, before they left, he’d spoken vaguely about joining them, they’d never truly imagined that he would come; they hardly dared to imagine he’d even remember them.

Everything was less frightening with Mattie there. They hadn’t known how frightened they were until he relieved them of so many burdens, with his grownup competence and worldly know-how and sheer manly bulk: helping them with their packs, scaring off predators, reassuring shopkeepers and ticket inspectors. He knew his way around everywhere; he knew the necessary words in all the languages; he knew how to interpret things and what to think; he knew all about the artists whose names they were only beginning to learn; he showed them how to look. This was real: in front of the Tintorettos in San Rocco in Venice he spoke in such a way that paintings of the Crucifixion and the Nativity and the lonely Magdalen came to life, seemed urgent and magnificent and contemporary. They never forgot this.

And at night they managed somehow to sleep all three in Jane’s little tent, with their sleeping bags zipped together. The girls had assumed that Mattie would bring his own tent; when they saw that he hadn’t they were breathless with excitement and anxiety. How would they arrange things? Mattie dealt with it all very calmly; he simply took it for granted that he would make love to both of them, each one in turn or both at the same time.

Geraldine and Jane met for coffee the day after Geraldine’s dream, at a place they liked at the end of Jane’s road. It was busy but they found a table for two by a steamed-up window, enjoying the ritual of unpeeling coats and scarves, stowing bags, settling in for an expansive talk. Each was pleased with the other for still looking capable and smart and interesting, not showing any signs yet of dottiness or disintegration. Jane ordered a black coffee, Geraldine a turmeric latte with oat milk; she always felt, when she was with Jane, that her preferences were an unnecessary fuss. “You’re so up-to-the-minute,” Jane commented. “I suppose all the young people are drinking that.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I just like it.”

Jane peered at the cup dubiously. “Are you sure?”

They discussed their children and grandchildren for some time, with intense interest. For years, the two families had gone on holiday together, and their children were like cousins; each tribe had its critique, too, of the other. There were problems with Jane’s eldest daughter, who was struggling with her babies, and with Geraldine’s middle son, who was getting divorced: their talk wound sympathetically and more or less tactfully around these issues, delving deep into the children’s characters and situations. It was impossible to tell who was the more powerful in the friendship. Jane was naturally bossy, and her pointed irony and economical phrasing were the habits of a lifetime. But Geraldine had never wholly submitted to her friend’s forceful influence, which was probably why they’d stayed close across so many decades. Geraldine had guarded her interior life fiercely, even through her years of mothering and a difficult marriage. She couldn’t have given herself over to a life like Jane’s, in the bright blunting light of public affairs.

“So you dreamed about old Mattie,” Jane said. “I never think about him.”

“He was important in our lives, though.”

“We had a crush on him,” Jane said. “You were an awful flirt in those days. From my perspective now it all seems so remote—I can hardly remember him. I can hardly remember the past. Only a few things stand out.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Geraldine thought that Jane liked to protect herself, pretending to be invulnerable.

“When you’re having those experiences,” Jane said, “you think it’ll all matter so much later on, when you’re older. You imagine yourself reading old letters, looking at photographs, reminiscing with wistful tears, that sort of thing. But the truth is that you leave most of it behind you. The present is paramount. It’s always everything.”

“Isn’t there some tragic kind of brain damage where you can only live in the present moment?”

“Obviously I don’t mean that. But those old stories diminish and don’t matter anymore. It’s shocking, really. We believe we can keep everything and make it all add up.”

Geraldine considered this carefully. “Some of the stories matter to me.”

“You have too much time to think. You need distraction.”

“Things from the past, which I thought were tidied away, swell into new significance in old age.”

“You talk as if we’re ancient. We’re not that far gone yet.”

“I see things in their right proportions, now that they’re so far in the past. They’ve become grand and moving. Mythic.”

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“You’ll have to come to dinner. I’ll get Felix to cook his fish soup.”

Jane’s husband was a gardener and an amateur cellist. Everyone liked Felix, a subtle, gentle man. He’d been the children’s primary carer, back in the days when that was radical.

“Felix is pleased with the new viola player in his quartet.” Jane reflected. “Perhaps I’ll invite him, too. His wife died.”

“Stop trying to pair me off,” Geraldine complained.

But she didn’t really mind. She thought it was funny—they both did.

Sex in that tent with Mattie, in the nineteen-seventies, wasn’t altogether satisfactory, confined inside a wedge of orange canvas, which was either brilliantly luminous or invisible, baking or soaking, depending on the time of day and the weather. If it was soaking you tried not to brush against it, because that made the rain run in. Sometimes the heat of other bodies was almost intolerable, and they were slick with sweat; sometimes they were grateful for it, snuggling up for warmth. At night in the dark, in the midst of their shifting, murmuring, groaning, and mostly wordless rearrangements of limbs and positions, they were sometimes unsure whose body it was, whose leg, the pressure of whose weight. Of course Mattie was more hairy, and the girls were softer. There was a lot of exquisite touching, which often painfully didn’t come to anything—at least not for the girls. Although they had both slept with quite a few people by then, they weren’t very skilled at it yet, not confident at getting what they wanted. Perhaps Jane was more so than Geraldine. The intimacy with Mattie ought to have been an extraordinary fulfillment, but that hung somewhere just out of reach; mysteries that should have been unveiled stayed hidden. The object of their longing was pressed as close to them—to both of them—as was humanly possible, and yet the secret of him slipped away. They’d imagined that, in such intimate exchanges with Mattie, they would possess part of him. Or they’d imagined that they’d be seen by him, finally, and explained to themselves. Instead, Geraldine lay in the tent all day once, weeping, while the other two went off to see the Masaccios in the Brancacci Chapel.

At least the girls were on the pill. Mattie had assured himself of that before he began, responsible and sensible. He was almost too responsible and sensible. Although he loved D. H. Lawrence as much as they did, his cheerful enjoyment of their arrangement in the tent wasn’t quite what the girls wanted. It seemed too casual, or absent-minded, as if sex were just a part of the ordinary huge pleasure he took in everything: in a plate of spaghetti or a bottle of wine or the frescoes in an old church.

Jane wore a silk scarf and a black velvet jacket to their book group, very retired civil servant; Geraldine had slimmed down with age and went for a more boho style, with beads and drapey tops. Jane could have looked dull but instead was somehow weighty and impressive, a crisp critical awareness alert in her big bland face; she was merciless when it came to discussing the books. Geraldine was sure she’d never seen the black jacket before. Since she retired, Jane seemed to be spending an extravagant amount on clothes, although she denied it flatly. I’ve had this old thing for years. She and Felix had plenty of money, anyhow: he’d inherited from wealthy parents. And he’d have encouraged his wife to treat herself—although probably she fibbed to him, too, out of sheer perversity.

The book group had degenerated somewhat, Jane and Geraldine both thought, into a kind of dining club, each member feeling obligated to put on a spread of delicious Ottolenghi-type dishes when it was their turn to host. Discussion of the books was too perfunctory; the two friends’ ideal would have been more like a seminar. They brought their books marked up and bristling with torn slips of paper, and were disappointed when they were hardly opened. Both of them devoured fiction: Jane, a history graduate, was susceptible to a serious theme and anything in translation, whereas Geraldine, who’d done English literature, insisted she cared only about the sentences. Life was hard, she said. Thank God for sentences.

After the book-group meal, the two of them slipped into the garden in the dark, so that Jane could indulge another of her vices, smoking her little rollies in black licorice paper: she claimed improbably that Felix knew nothing about these. It was October and had just rained; the lawn was sodden underfoot, and their sleeves were soaked from brushing the evergreens strung with raindrops. Rank smells flooded from the vegetation, and the clean dry smoke of the rollie curled around them pleasantly. It was somehow moving to observe, through the lit windows of the room behind them, the animated company they’d left: five women and two men around the table, with its despoiled and emptied dishes, crumpled colored napkins, half-drunk glasses. By now, the talk was off the book and onto politics, faces were sad and serious; these were good people. One of the women worked for the Refugee Council; one was a Green activist.

“Ever since I had that dream,” Geraldine said, “Mattie Szymanski’s haunted me. His actual aura, as if he were present close by. I can smell his sort of woolly smell—wood smoke and tobacco and wet jumper. So comforting: as if he’d put his arms around me.”

She was risking something by confessing this, and she sensed Jane wanting to say, For goodness sake, but refraining. Which meant that she felt sorry for Geraldine, who was pitifully single and susceptible. But Geraldine wasn’t really pitiful, and didn’t care as much as she used to what anyone thought of her, or if they saw through to her susceptibilities. What was the point of keeping all those secrets? Wasn’t your story wasted if nobody knew it?

“Don’t you think,” she went on, “that in the old days men were, in some sense, what we made them? They became heroically intellectual because we thought they were. Just as women became the dreamy spiritual creatures that men wanted them to be. To some extent. I know that irony undercuts all that, exposes the reality. But, to some extent, those characters became reality because we imagined them.”

Turning her head to blow out smoke, Jane seemed to reflect on this, a pinpoint of thought in her face, pale in the reflected light from the windows. “Did you know I saw him once in a shoe shop?”

Geraldine felt a familiar mild annoyance at her friend’s evasion, how she deflected earnestness. “I suppose that even heroes have to buy shoes.”

“He wasn’t buying them,” Jane explained. “He was selling them. It was in a dreary shoe shop around the corner from where we lived in Fulham; he must have got a job there. I had the children by then and I used to take them in to get their feet measured, but on this occasion it was just me. I was in a hurry—I needed shoes for an interview for a promotion or something. And Mattie didn’t recognize me. I mean, really! But I suppose this was when he was back from travelling and in a bad way—his mind was wiped, his mother was looking after him. And there he was kneeling at my feet—where I’d always wanted him, in fact—and pulling these cheap black shoes out of the box, where they were wrapped in tissue paper in an effort to make them look like something special. He was an absolutely hopeless salesman, as you can imagine. He’d brought me the wrong size and was trying to force my foot into one of them, forgetting there was even a human being on the other end of it. So there I was, like one of the ugly sisters in Cinderella, feeling I ought to be cutting off my own toes, staring down into a bald patch in the middle of his curls. They’d made him tie his hair back in a ponytail for work. I wanted to say something tender and significant, like, ‘Mattie, don’t you remember the night of that full moon in Sorrento?’ But I didn’t really have the time, I needed to get out of there, I had my life to get on with. I told him the shoes weren’t quite what I had wanted. I don’t think he lasted long as a shoe salesman. The next time I went in he wasn’t there.”

“Perhaps he did recognize you and he was embarrassed.”

“We’ll never know.”

“I’d love to talk to him again, though,” Geraldine mused. “He had a big mind, and a big conception of life. He’d have some interesting way to look at the horrible things that are going on now.”

Mattie had fucked up. He’d stayed away too long. He and the girls had parted ways, for reasons they couldn’t clearly remember afterward; probably he found them too young and too clingy, and wanted to forge forward unencumbered. Geraldine’s weeping in the tent might have had something to do with it. Things weren’t always joyous, in that time they spent with Mattie; sometimes on a damp day, when he was tired of them, he was hangdog and glum and tetchy. After they parted, the girls got entangled with those bad men in the caravan, as if to prove that they weren’t afraid of getting into deeper water, although they should have been. Then they went home to look for jobs, and work out what they were going to be. But Mattie bummed around southern Europe for years. He decided that bringing in the grape harvest in France, or working on a fishing boat off the Greek islands, was more real than life in a university and his thesis on Hardy, and perhaps it was. Every so often he sent Jane or Geraldine a postcard. Then his father died suddenly, from a coronary, but Mattie stayed abroad, drinking too much. He had definitely always, when the girls thought about it, had a bit of a thing about his father. It was hard for any son to live up to a man who’d fought in the Warsaw Uprising.

When the postcards dried up, the girls had news of Mattie intermittently, from friends of friends: he’d got into drugs and into trouble, spent time in hospital and then in a Spanish prison. He came home eventually in quite a state, to be nursed more or less back to health by his mother, who resented it.

“Oh, well, it was a life,” Geraldine said. “We all fuck up in our different ways.”

It was odd that Jane hadn’t told her before, about the shoe shop. Geraldine had met up with Mattie, too, once or twice, after he got back—at a later date than the shoe shop presumably, because by then he had a perfectly decent job, working for the Central Office of Information in Waterloo, putting out warnings on television about food hygiene and “stranger danger.” He was nice after his return but definitely chastened and less ebullient: it wasn’t like the days when you used to believe, for as long as you were with him, that you were at the center of something. His studio flat was dingy and poky and too full with all his books, which his mother refused to keep for him any longer. Even so, Geraldine might have sought him out more often, because she was still a little bit in love with him, and because she was on and off at that time in her marriage. But then Mattie himself got married, to a meek, dumpy little woman who made it clear that she didn’t want Geraldine hanging about—unsurprisingly perhaps, if she knew what had gone on in the tent.

And then Mattie died, in a stupid accident that could have happened to anyone—falling off a ladder while he was fixing a TV aerial on a roof. Geraldine and Jane had both lost touch with him by the time this happened. He’d moved with his wife and their baby up north somewhere. The news took a while to get back to his friends from the old days.

Geraldine walked over to Felix and Jane’s for fish soup, through long autumn shadows in the park, haze rising like smoke from the grass, illumined by the low sun. Their house, on an expensive, smart street, was surprisingly chaotic inside, with an ugly leather sofa pushed back against the fireplace and broken Venetian blinds across the windows. The dining table had been cleared of its papers and laptop and vase of dead greenery in murky water: all these were now on the floor. Jane was always too busy to bother with her surroundings, and Felix had his mind on higher things; their mess thrilled and exasperated Geraldine, whose own home was a succession of inviting arty spaces, lovingly tended and pristine. The soup and the wine were good, though, and Ivor, the viola player, was small and shy, with a shock of flossy white hair. He looked faintly panicked, but he knew a lot about music, thinking carefully before he spoke and making nuanced discriminations: this pianist rather than that one, the E-flat trio rather than the B-flat. Felix attended to him conscientiously.

“Jane and I have been friends forever,” Geraldine explained.

“Oh, yes, we literally met back in the Stone Age,” Jane confirmed. “We shared a tent when we went travelling.”

“In the Stone Age. It was woven out of animal hides or something.”

The women chattered away—book-club book, mortality, bumper harvest in the allotment, social media, America—and the men smiled at them, bemused or fond. It was a nice evening; they all enjoyed themselves. Geraldine felt tenderly toward their old ruined faces around the table, pouchy and sagging and blotched with experience; the viola player, with his fine black eyes and waxy thin skin, stretched over the bones of his face, made her think of some aged genius composer from the nineteenth century. And she liked going out to socialize on her own, without the worry of whether her husband was going to hate it, or offend somebody. Terry had been difficult, a Trotskyite would-be playwright, charismatic when he was young. She’d been besotted with him in the beginning, and had taken on all his opinions as her own. He and Jane used to have the most terrible arguments while Geraldine cried in the bathroom; he wanted to despise Jane as part of the bourgeois establishment, but her origins were as working class as his, and she was cleverer. Then, when Terry was ill, Jane was so kind to him, cheering him up with her boisterous camaraderie.

When Geraldine and Jane first got back from their time in Europe, and Jane was starting out on her career, they drifted apart for a few years. They didn’t want to be reminded, most likely, of their embarrassing mistakes—not so much Mattie but what went on in that caravan outside Nice. In any case, in the first heat of their serious adventures with men, female friends seemed dispensable. Geraldine met Terry, and Jane had a painful affair with someone married. Then she found Felix, and the two women bumped into each other by chance one afternoon at Paddington station, both obviously pregnant; Geraldine had moved to Bristol by this time. A snatched quick exchange of news, and phone numbers on scraps of paper, before they had to hurry away in opposite directions, wasn’t enough. They telephoned that evening and picked their friendship up as if they’d never put it down.

Geraldine woke to the sound of knocking, a few hard taps at first and then an insistent fierce battering, demanding her wakeful attention: rain on the skylights. She sat up in bed as abruptly as if someone had called her, in her nightdress in the gray dawn. After a while, the rain’s intensity lapsed and withdrew and became a softer pressure, enveloping the room in its cocoon. Earlier in the year they’d been afraid of a drought, and now this plenty, this too-much, night after night for a week. The garden would be happy—and she was excited, waking up to rain at first light. It was probably part of climate change, this extremity, first drought and then downpour, but you couldn’t always worry. Sometimes you just had to submit to what the sky brought. Old age wasn’t all calms and shallows; there were whirlpools and black water—the ordeal of her parents’ deaths, then the years of her husband’s illness and death. And because Geraldine had been thinking about Mattie Szymanski, she remembered him taking down a book from a shelf once, and opening it and reading out loud to her. She had no idea now what he’d read, or whether it was poetry or prose: something amazing, anyhow, that had liberated them both into the great terrain of the imagination.

This was in that studio flat of his, when he’d come back from abroad and settled down; his wife, who disapproved of books and of Geraldine, was preparing food in the kitchenette. Mattie wasn’t drinking but Geraldine was; she must have brought gin with her. She was enjoying every mouthful of a big gin-and-tonic, although her hosts had failed to come up with ice or lemon. The alcohol was sharpening her mind to a high pitch of awareness and longing.

And she wailed and complained because there wasn’t enough time to read everything. How lucky Mattie was, she exclaimed, with all his books! She would never know all the things he knew! She had her children by then and her days were full with caring for them and with domestic management, yet somehow she’d contrived to escape for an evening and get to London—and with a bottle of gin, too, which surely she couldn’t afford. What she remembered was Mattie in his hairy, woolly, smelly jumper saying that it didn’t matter about having time or finishing things. You could never read everything. Completion or mastery were beside the point. All that counted were those occasions when you picked up a book and opened it and its words attached themselves to that moment and transfigured it, and then the moment passed. ♦

If alpine skiing is about getting down a trail as fast as possible, freestyle skiing is about what you do along the way: flips, twists, and other high-wire shenanigans more typically associated with gymnastics or, in the world of winter sports, snowboarding. The 2014 Olympic Games, in Sochi, were the first to introduce the freestyle discipline of slopestyle, in which competitors make their way down a purpose-built course of rails and jumps, performing tricks as they go. That year, Americans swept the medals in slopestyle skiing, and Gus Kenworthy, who took silver, emerged from the competition as a media favorite, making headlines for his efforts to rescue a family of stray dogs and for his status as an all-American hunk. He was linked to the figure skater Gracie Gold and to the pop star Miley Cyrus. Then, in 2015, he came out as gay, in a cover story for ESPN the Magazine, and became the first openly gay competitor in so-called action sports. At the next Winter Olympics, in Pyeongchang, Kenworthy missed the podium, but he reached a personal milestone when he was captured kissing his boyfriend on camera.

In the following years, Kenworthy began competing for Great Britain, where he was born, but he told the media that Beijing, in 2022, would be his last Games. Meanwhile, he turned his focus to acting, racking up credits in the revival of “Will & Grace” and on the ninth season of “American Horror Story.” He burnished his gay bona fides, guest-judging an episode of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and appearing as a mentor of sorts on the reality series “Coming Out Colton,” about his friend Colton Underwood, a former professional football player who dated thirty women on “The Bachelor” before announcing that he was gay. Like many retired Olympians, though, Kenworthy was left with a feeling that he had more to give. This May, he announced that he’d be making a bid for the 2026 Games, in Milan and Cortina, which begin on February 6th. Last week, it was announced that he’d made the team.

Kenworthy is gunning to reach the finals in the half-pipe, an event in which he’d finished eighth at the previous Games. He is among several star athletes attempting comebacks this year, including the legendary alpine skier Lindsey Vonn, who, at forty-one—with a knee replacement—recently won her latest World Cup. “My comeback is jealous of her comeback,” Kenworthy told me one recent afternoon at Soho House, in New York, as he drank cold brew served in a brandy snifter. Kenworthy had a gold ring in his right ear and wore a white hoodie from Moncler, one of his brand sponsors. He was preparing to head to Aspen for the X Games, freestyle skiing’s banner event—and arguably a bigger deal for skiers than the Olympics. He’ll compete on Sunday, and then head to Milan. We spent three hours discussing his athletic breakthrough, his acting career, and the parallels between his life and the surprise hit TV series “Heated Rivalry,” which follows the clandestine relationship of a pair of closeted gay hockey players. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What was the period of time like between May, when you announced your comeback, and December, when you competed at your first event, in China?

I had the idea that I wanted to come back, but I didn’t even know if it was possible. May was actually my first time on snow. I had made all these calls and moved around all these parts to make sure I’d be eligible to try for the Olympics again. But I literally hadn’t skied yet, and I didn’t know if it was all gonna come back to me.

I heard that you were doing double corks by the end of the first day.

Yeah. There is something wrong with me. Other people come back from an injury or a long period off, and they come back really trepidatious. Sometimes athletes never get back to where they were because they’re scared. I don’t know why, but I don’t have that. I’m a masochist, or a glutton for punishment, or something. I’m fine to try the same thing that I got hurt on again. I don’t want to get hurt. But it’s part of it. And I am at peace with that.

Were you in the gym a lot beforehand?

I’ve been in the gym pretty consistently since the last Olympics—more skewed toward being gay and going to the gym, versus being an athlete. Not that it’s all vanity pumps. But when I’m skiing, I’m focussed on core strength, and explosive power with my legs. You don’t really want a big upper body for skiing.

This will be your fourth Olympics. Beijing, in 2022, was called your swan song. How have your training and preparation changed?

Training for Beijing was tainted. I had a couple of bad head injuries, and then COVID. Leading up to those Olympics, I barely skied. I’d do two or three runs, and that was the most, because I would puke, or feel totally out of it, and my coach and I would pull the plug. I barely made it into the final. It was meant to be my swan song, but I wasn’t skiing at my level, and then I ended eighth. I had already said I’d be done after the event, and it wasn’t hard to follow through on that, because skiing felt so shitty. I was ready. But it also wasn’t the result I wanted to go out on.

It kind of nagged at me. And then I started feeling like myself again, and I started thinking, Oh, I have more to give.

In the past few years, professional sports have been dominated by discussions about safety, well-being, and mental health. I’m thinking of Simone Biles’s decision to withdraw from competition in Tokyo. I’ve also read about Mikaela Shiffrin puking at the top of runs. Have you worked with any sports psychologists?

I haven’t. With experience, I’ve come into my own in terms of handling nerves. When I was younger on the contest scene, I’d frequently puke before a run. I’d be at the top, and I’d have to run to the woods. That doesn’t really happen anymore. I mean, everyone gets the nervous pee—where you have to pee, even if you don’t. Having done this for so long, I feel like I’m able to control my nerves a little more. But I love the focus on mental health. Athletes are human, and sometimes we forget.

I’m with a new coach this time. He’s basically, like, “I just want to keep you safe—not even just because I want you to be safe but because, if you take a slam and are out for two weeks, we can’t afford that.” It’s been a different approach. We’re going to go back to basics. I didn’t really trust it at first. I felt embarrassed—like I was this old guy coming back out of retirement. I was at these training camps with all these young kids, and I was doing these easy tricks while the other guys were working on their big things. But then, when we finally got to the point where he was, like, “O.K., I feel like it’s time to start doing them,” they have gone a lot better. Knock on wood, but I feel like we’re doing them safer.

What is your dream run on the half-pipe this time around?

I haven’t done it yet, but it involves both-ways double fourteens, both-ways switch doubles, and my signature alley-oop double. So it’s a double on every hit. If I can land them and carry speed into the switch doubles both ways, I think that’s my only real chance at winning. The other run that I’ve been doing is a stepped-down version. That’s a good run, and it could maybe get on the podium, but it’s not the winning run.

You’ve talked in the past about getting more support from Team Great Britain than from the U.S. in qualifications. What was the reaction when you said you wanted to come back?

The U.S. has so many athletes—you’re just kind of a cog in the machine. With G.B., at least at the last Olympics, I was the only guy going for pipe, so I had more flexibility. This time, when I told them I wanted to come back, they were, like, “Oh, my God, that’s amazing.” And then: “Our budgets were allocated after the last Olympics. They don’t reset until the next Olympics. We love you, we support you, but we don’t have budget for you.” I’ve had to hire my coach out of pocket, all of the training camps out of pocket—paid for me and my coach to fly there, stay there, eat there. Lift tickets, insurance. It’s been a very different experience.

Do you identify as a Brit?

One misconception is that I live in the U.K., or that when I switched to G.B. I moved to London. But I didn’t, and nothing ever changed. I like when articles say “British-American.” I’m British-born. My mom’s British, but I would say I feel more like an American.

You grew up in Telluride. When did you first get on skis?

My family started all together. My mom was forty, and I was three, and we learned together. When I was really young, I would fall asleep on the chairlift, with my head in her lap. She would wake me up at the top to come down.

How did the tricks come in?

They were gonna put me in club, and I had the choice of being a racer or doing moguls, and I chose moguls because the racers had to get up earlier. I didn’t want to get up early, and I didn’t want to wear the skintight suit. What I liked about moguls was the jumps. I fell in love. Around that time, I think, Telluride started building its first terrain park, and I became a park rat.

Acting was also a passion for you back then. There was a “Grease” production, right?

There was, but I wasn’t even in it. I was slated to be in it, and then realized the performances were going to be during a couple of amateur events I was really excited about, so I pulled out. But I did all the repertoire-theatre productions growing up, and I did really like it. It wasn’t competitive. They’re not impressive credits. I was an onion in “Jack and the Beanstalk.” It’s like the kids’ play in “Love Actually,” where she’s, like, “There was more than one lobster present at the birth of Jesus?”

When did you have to consciously decide skiing was going to be the focus?

There were two moments. Not to get dark, but when I was fourteen my best friend was killed when we were in the terrain park, and I initially thought I wasn’t gonna ski anymore. I didn’t want to ski past where that happened. I took a while off. And then my mom—and my friend’s mom—were, like, “You guys loved skiing. You can’t not ski.”

And I decided I was gonna pursue it more seriously. Then, when I was sixteen, I put a video online for a competition in Sweden. I uploaded mine onto a website called Zapiks, which was, for a very, very brief moment in time, YouTube specifically for action sports. I had never put anything online before. And it ended up kind of going viral. I got my first paying ski contract from a ski company in France. It was, like, a ten-thousand-dollar contract—not life-changing, but at that time pretty crazy.

Park-style skiing is a relatively recent addition to the Olympics. When you were aspiring to go pro, did you even think of the Games as the main event?

Everybody understands the Olympics is the biggest event and has the potential to change your life. But for me, growing up, it was the X Games. I remember watching Jonny Moseley in the ’98 Olympics and thinking it was monumental. But I didn’t want to do moguls—I wanted to do park, and it wasn’t even a thing at the time.

I owe so much to my Olympic silver medal. It did change my life. No other event could change your life like that, but you would have a harder time winning the World Cup we just had in Aspen, because everyone’s there. Even for this Olympics, there are a lot of guys who could be medal contenders, but they won’t be there because of caps per country, per discipline, per gender.

Were you prepared for what a huge turning point Sochi was in your career and in your life?

No. I wasn’t prepared for the press tour, being in the closet. And then ultimately that was the catalyst for wanting to come out. The coming out happened because of the medal, and the subsequent press tour, and how I felt about myself.

Sochi would have been a particularly complicated place to be in the closet. Was that political context something that figured in your consciousness?

We had media training with the U.S. team. Their way of circumnavigating anything about that law, the anti-L.G.B.T.Q. stuff, was, basically, “I’m not really here to talk about that. I’m here to talk about sport.”

And I remember I was, like, “Fuck that.” I wasn’t out, and I wasn’t ready to be out, but I had a boyfriend. I had this dream that I was gonna land the winning run, ski up to him, and kiss him. And then that was gonna be my coming out to everybody, and my silent protest. But it didn’t happen.

Do you think if you’d won gold it would have happened?

I don’t know. I hadn’t even told my mom that I was gay. I remember thinking it wasn’t fair for her to find out at the same time everybody else did, in that kind of way. I backpedaled for a few reasons. Another was—honestly, selfishly—that I landed the run I’d been dreaming of, and it was, like, Oh, shit. This is my moment. I got consumed by what was actually happening.

And then afterward—because our event was February 13th, and we swept the podium, and the next day was Valentine’s Day—all the reporters were asking: What’s your dream date? Who’s your celebrity crush? We were these three young guys. And I remember just feeling really tormented: Do I make a joke in quotes and say, like, Jake Gyllenhaal?

A good choice.

He’s great. But I kind of panicked and said Miley Cyrus. Nick Goepper said Taylor Swift, and Joss Christensen said Emma Watson. And all these people tweeted it out. Neither of those girls responded to those guys, but Miley tweeted at me and followed me. It was surreal for a number of reasons, but I was also digging myself this deeper and deeper hole.

Miley Cyrus is a gay icon.

I actually love her. But then there was some flirty texting, and I remember thinking, What am I doing? I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to keep waking up and lying.

Was it nerve-racking to have both your relatives and your boyfriend at those Olympics?

I didn’t have my family, actually. I was kind of a dark horse for those Games, and by the time I had been announced it was too expensive to travel, and my family couldn’t afford it. My now ex bamboozled a media credential.

Did your teammates know?

No. I was sharing a room with my best skier friend, Bobby Brown. I wanted to tell him, but I got in my head thinking it might have an adverse reaction for him, and I didn’t want to be responsible for him not performing well. So I bit my tongue.

How did the decision to come out in ESPN come about?

I’d started telling a few people prior to that. I was at Bobby’s house with him and his girlfriend—now wife—Nikki. I grew up with her, and when I told them, she said, “We’ve been waiting for you to tell us.” And it was such a nice reaction. I felt seen and supported. I told my mom, and she was supportive. Every time I told someone, the reaction was so much better than I’d anticipated.

With ESPN, I wanted to do it in a big way. ESPN for me was the X Games, our marquee event. I felt they would tell the story best, and I didn’t want to do it in a sit-down interview on camera, where maybe I would get choked up or mess up my words. I wanted it to be a written piece, a kind of one and done. I was scared of telling one person and having it become hearsay or gossip. I wanted to be the one to make that announcement.

Did anything surprise you about the reaction?

When I told my brother—this straight, straight guy—he ended up breaking down in tears, which was very sweet. He was, like, “I’m so sorry for anything I ever did that would have made your life harder,” because I did get beat up on and called names. He was, like, “I never actually thought you were gay. I thought I was teasing you.”

After ESPN, there was a skier who reached out. I don’t know if I should say his name, but I’d grown up idolizing him a little bit. I was eighteen and started hanging out with my first boyfriend. He worked on the snowboard side of the tour, and there were jokes and teases about us, because suddenly we were fast friends. We were very paranoid—we were never holding hands or kissing—but we were together a lot. One time, at the World Championships in Whistler, I was a bit late showing up to practice, and all the athletes were standing at the start gate, waiting for practice to open. I was walking up and the older skier I idolized yelled, “You’re late. What—were you sucking your boyfriend’s dick?” And I remember I froze and just felt so shitty about myself. I was so taken aback by it. I ended up winning the event, and later, when the ESPN article came out, I got a text from him apologizing. In general, there was still some negativity, but for the most part I felt met with so much support. Miley posted the cover on her Instagram.

Did the homophobia come mostly from other athletes or from authority figures?

Part of the reason that I wanted to leave the U.S. team was that, after I came out, the head coach messaged the other guys on the slope team and was basically, like, “Hey, I’m sure everyone saw Gus’s announcement. We’re super happy for him, but I just wanted to drop a note. If any of you aren’t comfortable sharing a room with him now, let me know so we can make sure that everyone’s accommodated.”

Oh, my God.

I had two good friends on the team—one showed me it—and I remember feeling really hurt. Maybe it wasn’t meant to be coming from this horrible place—maybe he just wanted everyone to be comfortable—but I was, like, “What the fuck? I’ve been on the fucking team for six years.” [The U.S. freeski team did not respond to a request for comment.]

Hearing that story, I can’t help thinking of the debates surrounding trans athletes in sports, and in shared spaces like locker rooms. Without asking you to weigh in on specific eligibility policies, I wonder what you’ve made of the controversy.

I strongly feel people should be allowed to do what they want to do, and what makes them feel safe, if they’re not harming anybody else. And if that’s being in a certain locker room because that’s how they identify, I think they should be granted that privilege. We should stay out of other people’s business. And there are these arguments and fear-mongering tactics the right wing uses to try to divide us. Whether it’s drag queens reading to kids or people using bathrooms for the gender they identify with—that’s not actually harming people. Look at all these people who are groomers and predators, and our fucking President, who’s, like, a sex offender. Those are actual threats to people. Not someone wearing makeup.

I want to be inclusive and supportive, and I want everybody to be able to participate, but I don’t have all the answers. And it’s tricky, because if officials start saying you have to have under a certain amount of testosterone or whatever—well, you could be a cisgender woman and have above those levels, and that doesn’t make you anything other than a cisgender woman. So it’s nuanced, and I’m scared of putting my foot in my mouth, but I do think, ultimately, that the people being hurt by bans are kids. It’s kids who want to play sports with their friends. Sport should be inclusive. It’s meant to be this thing that breaks down barriers. So it just feels devastating that people are being stripped of that privilege.

You’ve talked about how in 2018, even though the finish wasn’t as rewarding for you as Sochi, the Games were special because you got that moment of a live kiss with your then boyfriend on television.

It was such an inconsequential kiss. It wasn’t the same as winning and then kissing, or having this huge public declaration. It wasn’t even during the contest. I was finishing warmups and heading out for qualifying, and I gave my mom and my family a hug goodbye and my now ex, Matt, this really pathetic kiss, because it was in front of my mom. But I left the Olympics somehow feeling more fulfilled than I had after the previous Games, when I medalled but was in the closet.

Speaking of cameras, tell me about your acting career so far.

It can be pretty thankless. I have spent so many hours, days and days accumulated, reading a pilot, reading a script, working on scenes, learning the lines, getting someone to put me on tape, feeling really good about it, sending it in. And then zero feedback. No notes. It’s pretty painful. It’s a lot of rejection. Freestyle skiing is a judged sport, so it’s kind of the same thing: you do what you can, and it’s in someone else’s hands. But there’s still the immediate gratification of getting a score, even if you don’t agree with it.

One of my friends said there were three ways you can make it as an actor. One way is you’re absolutely undeniable: you’re Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep—which is not me. Then there’s right place, right time, which is just luck. And then there’s the person that chips at it and chips at it until they finally break through, and it’s an endurance game.

I really like acting, and I’ve grown to love the craft of it. One of the things I like so much is that you keep getting better and you don’t age out of it like a sport. But I don’t think I want to be someone in that last category that chips away at it and chips away at it with no success. So I’m not putting all my eggs in that basket. That being said, I got asked to audition for the current season of “The White Lotus.” I didn’t book it, but I was, like, “I’ll tape for that.”

What was it like working with Ryan Murphy on “American Horror Story”?

Amazing—except I didn’t really work with him. He wasn’t on set at all, but just getting to be on that set was such a dream. I loved sitting in the hair-and-makeup chair, talking with the artists. And I loved getting the scenes delivered, and blocking everything we were gonna do, and then rehearsing and running it. When they’re calling last looks, it’s the same kind of butterflies and nervousness that you get before dropping in for a ski run. I haven’t found many other things that approximate that.

I watched “Coming Out Colton,” and you’re in it as his kind of fairy godmother. It was moving seeing you take on that role. How did you first meet him?

Well, I did a podcast a long time ago, and he was the other guest. It was before he was on “The Bachelor.” Throughout the podcast, I was teasing him, because I thought he was this straight bro. I didn’t think about it again, and then when he was doing “Coming Out Colton” my team reached out and said, “Someone very public’s coming out. Do you want to be a part of it?” Very cryptic.

Doing that show is something that I feel came back to bite me in the ass. He got a lot of flak for it, and I got a lot of flak for being part of it.

How so?

He’s this attractive cisgender white gay getting a show about coming out, and there are further marginalized voices in the community who are so overlooked and underrepresented. I don’t disagree with that, but also, like, it’d be nice if it were this and that. Ultimately, I think the show was pretty harmless. And I know, from talking with Colton, that it has helped a lot of people in their own journey, in the same way that everything does—my coming out, or “Heated Rivalry.”

We’ve gotta talk about “Heated Rivalry.” How far along are you?

I just finished. At first, I didn’t understand the big deal. It was fun to watch, but it was sort of smut. I honestly thought, All these thirsty gays! Y’all are just horny. Like, you could watch porn?

People kept telling me, “Just wait—it tugs on the heartstrings.” And then it did. The third episode changed things for me. I actually wrote a message to the show’s creator because I was so moved, and didn’t expect to be. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen myself reflected onscreen like that, in such a substantial way. The parallels are kind of insane. I also had a secret relationship, with these clandestine meetings and hookups. And Miley Cyrus was my own Rose, this famous person that I was suddenly linked to, and as much as I kind of wanted it—because that’s the person you would want to be with if you’re straight, someone successful and beautiful and talented—it’s not the same as when you’re with a guy. And then the Scott Hunter character—I really related to him. He wanted to be out, but really, just truly felt like he couldn’t be, because of his circumstances. That was me for so many years. I had the same yearning—to be in love, to be public, and to not have to hide.

I hear Season 2 is shooting soon. I don’t know, I feel like there could be something there for you.

You know, I played hockey through high school. I can skate, and I know how to handle a stick. ♦